The challenges if this assignment were, firstly to be able to find all of this data. Florida does have GIS clearinghouses online that provide a wealth of GIS data, but searching for particular datasets is still rather tricky. Secondly, all the data needed to be transformed so that all shapefiles and rasters had the same projection coordinate system, and would thereby line up properly.
The search for data was complicated two main factors. First, while GIS datasets themselves are (hopefully) created with a great deal of metadata that lays out important information - such as datums, coordinate systems, dates that the data was collected and so on - the websites that provide searchable indices for data do not themselves have much in the way of search oriented metadata that would make searching for datasets fairly easy. Searching on these sites called to mind search engines from the mid-nineties before Google revolutionized search. Second, learning the jargon based search terms that produce the desired result is a skill that has to be learned. Progress was made on that front, but the bare bones search features provided by data providers is a problem that should be addressed.
The data transformation, by comparison, was relatively easy. All the data collected was based on the same datum, so transformation was fairly straightforward. Once all the data files were assessed as to their extant projection and datum, there were easily transformed.
From there it was simply a matter of creating maps that included all this data. As the assignment was primarily about gathering and preparing data, the cartographic phase of this assignment was slighted to some degree, especially as there were a lot of busy data layers to crowd into three maps.
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